30 jQuery Drag and Drop Plugins

With jQuery drag and drop plugins, creating cool drag and drop features on your web pages it is not as hard as it used to be.

Like most others with a great interest in web front-end development, jQuery have a special place in my heart. jQuery manages to bring the real goodies to us with only a few lines of code and every day it gets better. This is because the huge jQuery community keeps shipping awesome plugins; great thanks to everyone contributing! With jQuery, it is possible to create user friendly and sophisticated web user interfaces in a lightweight and elegant way. One of the most important aspects of creating good user interfaces is taking care of the user events; e.g. the user dragging stuff around on the page. Typically, in web development, this has not been trivial at all, but with jQuery the dark clouds are gone. This post give you 30 jQuery Plugins that will give you the poser to add Drag N’ Drop capabilities to your web front-ends. Keep in mind that some are in development or not fully maintained by the authors. Be careful if you use any of the plugins in client projects as you need to be able to support the solution. We also made collections of many other types of jQuery solutions and I recommend you check out some content sliders as they are very popular right now.

This article just got an update – I added new scripts and checked all links.

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links (at no extra cost to you). I recommend that you do your own independent research before purchasing any product or service. This article is not a guideline, a recommendation or endorsement of specific products.

This plugin offers, among other things, several widgets each of which can be collapsed, removed and edited. The widgets can be sorted into the three seperate columns by the user (using a drag and drop technique).

This plugin allows you to sort the order, then lets you save the list using ajax funtionality so the page does not reload. In addition, there is a messagebox that shows dynamically the status of whether the boxes have been moved, saved and whether the changes have been implemented to the database.

Need to accept CVs for your recruitment business online? Want to host user images? Or simply share images & files with friends and family? The unique drop and save application allows you to add this facility to your website, today and with minimum hassle.

This plugin is great for user customization and designing, whether it be clothing, business cards or electronic devices. You don’t need any vector files for the plugin, you just set png images for your elements and you tell the plugin which element can be colorized by the user. If it can be colorized, the image will be converted into a HTML5 canvas element.

This jQuery Plugin gives you an easy way to create a dynamic widget area. The widgets can easily be re-arranged and collapsed/expanded, and the layout is saved either in a MySQL database, or with HTML5 local storage (falling back to using cookies) so your users don’t need to start over when they come back to their dashboard.

The OneByOne Slider is a lightweight jQuery plugin you can use to display your image and text one by one. The CSS3 animation is driven by Animate.css. It’s mobile friendly, which support wipe left/right on your touch device like iPhone & iPad. You can drag and drop to navigate with your mouse too.

Dragging and dropping rows within a table can’t be handled by general purpose drag and drop utilities for a number of reasons, not least because you need to move the whole row, not just the cell that receives the mouse events. Re-parenting the row also requires specific code. Sadly also, effects like fadeIn and fadeOut don’t work well with table rows on all browsers, so we have to go for simpler effects.

This easy scroll application was made to simplify your work and save you time in developing any kind of web template or application, it can be easily inserted in any context and has a wide range of parameters that can make your scrolling unique.

Zoomer! is a cool tool for showcasing products, with its built-in zoom + panning + dragging features, which can be easily customized due to its flexible theme selector and config parameters, directly from the html file. Also more configurations can be edited through the css style sheet file. It comes with 3 themes, Dark, Light & Compact, to make easy the integration on your web project.

This is a jquery special event implementation of a drag event model. It is intended for use by developers who don’t need one bloated script full of idiot-proof logic and a million different options. This plugin simplifies handling drag events, by taking care of the DOM events when you bind a “drag” event handler, and triggering any other handlers at the appropriate time.

ppDrag is a Drag&Drop plugin for jQuery, which mimics the interface of jQuery UI‘s Draggable. Currently supported is a small subset of its options, but the implementation is different (ppDrag focuses on performance).

NestedSortable is an extension to the original Sortable from the Interface plugin that allows you to both sort vertically and nest (make one item a child of other item) elements at the same time, using drag-and-drop. If can be set up exactly like a regular Sortable and allows you to use most options that are inherited from it.

Scroll a large nested layer within a viewport using native scroll from the container. It does not require drag and drop functionality from UI and it is faster than UI dragging. Can be used to build a similar effect as in Google maps where you drag contents of a div acting as a viewport.

Adds collision detection to draggable objects. Add “collide: ‘block'” or “collide: ‘flag'” when you create a draggable: $(".box").draggable({collide: 'flag'}); or $(".box").draggable({collide: 'block'}); In ‘flag’ mode overlapping objects receive new classes – ‘ui-draggable-overlapping’ for the object being dragged and ‘ui-draggable-overlapped’ for the other object. In ‘block’ mode objects are blocked from overlapping other objects by being snapped to the edge of the object they collided with.

Mapbox is a plugin for creating zooming, draggable maps of limited size and depth, which have a defined boundary. It has many methods such as the ability to center the map on any given point, zoom in or out, zoom to any particular level, and move in any direction. All of these may also be accomplished either by dragging the map or with the mousewheel in conjunction with the mousewheel plugin.

Lars started tripwire magazine back in January 2009. He is really passionate about web design, web development and loves to look into new technologies, techniques, tools etc. and to write articles for his readers.